


Offering

by smolhombre



Category: Naruto
Genre: ALSO a Kakashi mood, And Also Himself, Animal Metaphors, Bunny Rabbits, But Also Not(ish), Commitment, Criminally Low Self-Worth & Clinical Depression Too Just for Funsies, Disability, Established Relationship, Hatake Clan Traditions, Introspection, Kakashi Hates his Job but Who Can Blame Him, Kakashi is Fed UP with Everything Not Matio Gai and THATS why We Stan, M/M, Pining, Post-War, Symbolism, The most relatable character for that reason alone, commitment issues, family baggage, it just be like that sometimes, yes im drunk on NYE tagging this fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-01
Updated: 2019-01-01
Packaged: 2019-10-01 19:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17249942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: Kakashi has very little left to give, but he wants Gai to have it anyway.





	Offering

Kakashi gets Gai a rabbit, which seems like an almost embarrassingly good idea at the time. Not even a rabbit, really; a _bunny_ , which is all the better. It’s little eyes aren’t quite open yet, and even with its ears up and stretched out to their tallest potential, it fits in his palm with room to fit maybe three more beside it.

But one is enough. One is better. Despite what Tenzou says Kakashi doesn’t dwell on his own intelligence often, but as he scoops the scrawny thing up from its litter he can’t help a little self-congratulatory smugness. He runs a whispersoft finger along its grey fur, glad the day outside is bright so he can see it, a little. The color is just luck, but that’s half of anyone’s genius, anyway.

After splitting with the Inuzuka main branch, most of the Hatake had long since moved north towards Cloud while the Inuzuka settled south in Leaf. But they share some things, still. They share this: Kakashi closing his fingers around the little rabbit; testing, weighing, considering. He can feel the quicksilver thrum of its minuscule heart working against his gloved hand when he dares a squeeze. When he opens the cage of his fingers again, its eyes barely slit open, liquid dark and shining.

He’s left enough of his scent around the warren that no one else will come close. Still, Kakashi kneels down one last time to pass the flat of his palm over the rest of the litter, blindly curled together and trembling.

In his hand, his bunny’s foot twitches, and Kakashi can’t help but smile fondly as he looks back down to it. This might even work.

“You’ll do.”

* * *

 It’s ostentatious, really, for them to both have their father’s houses, their own apartments, _and_ the Hokage residence.

“They’ll think I’m some sort of emperor,” Kakashi explains, halfheartedly paging through a pulpy paperback he had long forgotten about at the back of his bookshelf. He’s not sad he never got around to reading it. “If word gets out about my _five_ residences, I’d be inviting a coup. I’m a sitting duck.”

Gai frowns at the boxes strewn about the modest main room in his father’s house. Outside, Kakashi knows the ANBU in his guard are itching to come in and sweep the place, but he refuses to let them have this. This is Gai’s. This, hopefully, is theirs.

“Considering how much I know you love your job, that would be devastating.”

Kakashi snaps the book shut. “I knew you’d understand, Gai.”

But Gai is still not smiling when he glances back at Mirai, who leans against his broad shoulders as she gapes openly around the house.

“Would you mind —”

Kakashi nudges her aside before sticking his head out of the door, facing the ANBU hidden in the trees around the property. “Scram.”

Tenzou wavers until Mirai is nearly by his side at the treeline. Kakashi gives him an affectionate middle finger, which Tenzou and Mirai both return. They disappear with the rest of his guard, unhurried.

“No respect,” Kakashi hums, unbothered.

“It’s not very well lit up here,” Gai begins carefully. “The path up from the street, even. When it’s dark you can’t even see the moon sometimes for the trees.”

“Your apartment’s elevator hasn’t worked in twelve years,” Kakashi counters smoothly. “We tried living in mine before, and we both couldn’t fit. That was before factoring in your chair, too.”

Kakashi recognizes the shift in Gai’s expression when he decides this is worth a fight, even in the darkness. A pity, because after the war — no, that’s not right. Watching Sakura suckerpunch Kaguya, Obito’s blood real again on his hands, Gai’s tibia snapping in his ears over and over and not even halfway _through_ the war, Kakashi decided he had no more fight left in him to give. Even now for Gai, he can’t.

“You do not need to do this for me, Kakashi. You hate it here. I remember.”

“Untrue.” Kakashi grabs the handles of Gai’s chair and guides him into the main room proper. It smells of dust and disuse but also like Gai, too, underneath it all and with enough imagination. “I prefer it to anywhere else we could be.” Kakashi means that more than he will ever admit. He accepted his new duty even though he has nothing more to offer the Leaf, but he'll have this too. He has to, to have the other, to force himself upright and into the Tower, because for what else would it _matter_?

Gai's fists clench on the arms of his chair. “You avoided this place like —”

“I didn’t want to see your dad,” Kakashi shrugs. It’s like this always: he trades truths that are easier, at the time, for ones that aren’t, each of them a bartering chip that asks Gai to stay. “You and your dad, in the same house. Back then, I didn’t want to see it.”

He stumbles when Gai slams his good foot down, bringing the chair to a halt. His breathing is heavy, and Kakashi’s knuckles go white on the handles before he can stop himself.

“You never told me that.”

“I’m telling you now.” _Please let that be enough._

Maybe it is, but probably it isn’t. He’s made Gai make that enough since they were children. _I can’t give you what you deserve, will you settle for this instead?_

Gai stays silent as Kakashi turns away to mosy through the boxes. His back and his neck are wide open, and even though Gai can only hold a pen for a few minutes now before the spasms start, Kakashi trusts him with it.

The ANBU creep back to the property’s parameter as the sun starts to set fully behind the thick trees. They each flare a little chakra as they settle at their posts like a roll call. Kakashi doesn’t know how long it’s going to be before the people outside of this circle realize the extent of his blindness, but it doesn’t matter. He’ll learn the house before then. He’ll be out of office.

With any reasonable luck, he’ll have Gai.

The bunny is still packed up in his apartment with his personal items — Sakumo’s things mostly, but also Rin’s headband, Mr. Ukki, and something he generously calls a quilt from Kushina’s disastrous foray into sewing — but he’s going to have to do it, eventually. The fight is gone, but he reminds himself that means there’s nothing else left to lose.

* * *

 For almost a full day, Sakumo bartered with Nara Shikako for a buck three times his size that took him the rest of the evening to fell. Sumiye, he told Kakashi, hand in hand at her grave, said she'd have to make do, if that was truly his best. It was his fourth offer. Kakashi, even then, remembered Sumiye very little — white dog hair coarse on her trousers when he would grab for her with his clumsy hands, the feeling of her teeth, as sharp as his own, behind her mouth when she kissed his face, a laugh that filled up the house like he and Sakumo couldn’t quite seem to manage — but still he felt his chest pang. Kakashi believed him.

Sumiye, hard to catch but worth the hunt. Sakumo, and the offer of a safe place to graze when she felt like coming back to it. Sumiye, wild but gentle and Sakumo, patient and easy. Sumiye and Sakumo and a scarecrow in the field they met on, sometimes, to hold their place when they could come back to it again. Kakashi hadn’t pieced it together until they were both long dead, but perhaps that was for the best.

Sakumo squeezed his hand, looking tired but not as sad as he used to. Kakashi didn’t think he could make Sakumo happy like Sumiye did, but he had been trying very hard to at least not make Sakumo worse. He cleaned their house. He made their dinner. He practiced his katas without being asked so he didn’t have to bother Sakumo to teach him.

Kakashi remembers the three of them together that day like this; the memory happy and yellow in retrospect still. His mother is dead but his father is alive, and Kakashi has tried hard enough that it made a difference and _mattered_. Sakumo’s weary but dry face looks down to Kakashi’s like he sees him for the first time in a very long time. He keeps seeing him, after, and Kakashi keeps doing his best until Sakumo doesn’t cry anymore. For a while.

* * *

 Kakashi has to force a little chakra into his hands to keep Gai from ripping the resistance band from his grip.

“Careful,” he grunts. “We’re burning through my salary replacing these damned things.”

Gai, spread out on their living room floor, continues stretching like he can't hear him. Kakashi is too embarrassed to call their home a _den_ just yet, but it’s been weeks together and it feels like one and smells like it, too. Gai is maybe reluctant to show Kakashi exactly how happy he is to be back again, but Kakashi knows Gai, and it’s enough. As is his wont, of course, he ignores Kakashi’s protests and has Mirai put out enough lamps and candles for the house to be visible from space, but in all that light when Kakashi can sometimes make out Gai’s smudgy outline he can’t help but feel like maybe this was the right thing, after all, and Kakashi’s done it for once and not completely fucked it up.

“I want to move on to the next stage of my therapy.”

“I want to keep my hands attached, at least until I can sign this shitty job over to Naruto.”

“You’d find a way to sign with your teeth or your toes,” Gai wheezes, finally pulling up from his stretch with a smile. “ _Commit_ , Rival. You can do it if you try hard enough.”

Kakashi nearly chokes on the air in his throat. _He knows, he knows, he must —_

He grabs for Gai’s leg and starts massaging the wobbling muscle there without really thinking about it, and begins speaking in much the same.

“I have something for you.”

Gai’s grin is sharp and private. “The offer is noted, Kakashi, but perhaps another time. I think I’d fall asleep on you, even with your best efforts.”

He squeezes Gai’s thigh. “Maybe not my _best_ efforts, Gai."

From outside the door, a pointed cough. “Wait until Sai relieves me, Senpai, I beg you.”

“Do fuck off now, Tenzou-chan.” Kakashi doesn’t look away from Gai, even for a second. Tenzou doesn’t move, but that is something Kakashi very completely does not care about.

He can’t remember when young and dumb(er) Kakashi started to bare his throat to Gai in the way that Hatakes say _pack_ , but he feels himself doing it now for maybe the hundredth time without really thinking about it. Gai recognizes the tilt that leaves his neck available, and Kakashi doesn’t have to wait or ask before Gai puts the flat of his palm to his throat. _This should make it easier_ , he reminds himself, even though it doesn't. _Try harder._

“What is it, Kakashi?”

How to explain this, when even in his head Kakashi still can’t picture sake poured thrice in three cups and sipped in just as many? Even with Gai, who deserves —

“I got you a rabbit.”

Silence. The hand on his neck twitches.

“I...see. And...this is why you wanted me out of my apartment? Because they didn’t allow pets?”

Kakashi pulls the scroll from his pocket, unsealing it with numb fingers. “Not a pet. An offer.”

The bunny fills his hand up now, but only just. It was bound to be the runt of its litter, and Kakashi has hardly been nursing it to full health. It’s better, a little sickly like this.

“In my clan, the first hunt is...the offer has to match the, ah,” his face is so hot he may die from it. Tenzou’s chakra signature disappears quite suddenly; Kakashi probably owes him a pay raise, now. Maybe he’ll even follow through with that. Maybe.

“It has to match the intended,” Kakashi grinds out.

The air shifts as Gai leans closer to study the rabbit in Kakashi’s hand. Kakashi misses being able to see his face easily.

“But,” he continues, “I couldn’t find anything like that. Nothing I could catch for you would matter, because you could catch it just as easily. Maybe even easier, no matter how big it was, or how fast, because you’re stronger than I am. So I had to think of something else.”

He tugs his mask down. Gai watches the bunny as if it were an oracle.

“This is what I can offer you. It’s my —” _This was a good idea_ , he reminds himself, not believing a word of it. He knows he memorized the scrolls Sakumo left him _correctly_ , but he’s unsure still if they will be _right_ , or at least enough. He is tired of giving Gai less. “I offer you my weakness.”

Slowly, he brings the rabbit up to his bared teeth. In his hand, its pulse hammers so hard Kakashi can imagine hearing it, but it doesn't try to run. This is _embarrassing_. This is _hard_ , even after a lifetime of Kakashi doing difficult things that he hates and does not want to do. His mouth keeps the words coming, but that's really rarely been the issue. “I give it up for you.”

“Stop.”

Gai’s hand is rough and warm on his wrist, and Kakashi misses the heat of it on his neck almost like a pain.

“You don’t want it?”

He doesn’t speak for a long minute, and Kakashi can only count the bunny’s pulse against his father’s wide mouth and his mother’s sharp teeth. In the back of his throat, he can taste copper already.

“Do you need to do this? Is this what you want?”

“I want to keep you with me. If I need to show you like this, then it’s what I want.” He tightens his grip around the bunny before he can stop himself. Kakashi’s clan name meant little to him even before Sakumo’s death, but meaningless things are all he’s left to barter with. “I want to give you something, and this is all I’ve got, now. I don’t have anything else that’s just mine anymore. Just this, probably because no one else wants it. Will you take it?”

Gai peels his fingers away from the rabbit.

“I was under the impression, Rival, that I had this before now.”

Kakashi all but drops the bunny onto the floor. He expects it to run, but stays curled between their legs instead. Perhaps it feels too safe to move inside all the light Gai’s brought in the house. Kakashi can’t see it, but he feels its whiskers flit against the rough fabric over his knee. Both of Gai’s hands come up to bracket Kakashi’s neck; his fingers cradling the back of Kakashi’s skull, his thumbs pressing under Kakashi’s jaw so his head tilts back. Gai has scars on his throat where his hands are on Kakashi’s — where he fought, where he lived.  Like this, he makes Kakashi also want to keep living.

“You did. You do.”

Gai lets Kakashi's head fall back and drops his hands. He leans his cheek against Kakashi’s neck, and in the quiet and the light of their house it feels like Gai accepts.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Ueeehhhh. I needed to submit a short piece for a zine application, which is hard for my over writing ass. Even cutting *several* scenes out of this, it's a couple hundred over the word count. It feels over written in parts and too brief in others, but I worked hard on it lmao and I want to do better about posting my work knowing it's not/won't be perfect, etc. Maybe I'll go back and flesh it out like I want to since word count CLEARLY doesn't matter anymore/I can edit the scenes I cut, but for now I'll just share it as is :)
> 
> ANYWAY. Happy 2019 & Thanks for reading! I'd love to hear your feedback here or on my [tumblr](http://smolhombre.tumblr.com). :)


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